Lessenberry: Old-fashioned economic populism back in style with U.S. voters

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to autoworkers at the American Center for Mobility on March 15, 2017 in Ypsilanti, Mich. Trump discussed his priorities of improving conditions to bolster the manufacturing industry and reduce the outsourcing of American jobs.Bill Pugliano / Getty Images

Back in the 1980s, when the Democratic Party was in the middle of three straight huge presidential election defeats, moderates like then-governors Jim Blanchard of Michigan and Bill Clinton of Arkansas became convinced their party was too far to the left.

They founded a now-defunct group called the Democratic Leadership Council to pull the party more to the centre. Members were usually socially liberal — but economically more conservative.

They believed that appeals to old-fashioned economic populism of the sort that Franklin D. Roosevelt made famous were nowadays a recipe for defeat.

But could they have been wrong? Did they misinterpret the reasons for the defeats of candidates like Walter Mondale? Or could conditions have changed to where some form of left-wing populism may be back in style?

There is mounting evidence that both things may be true – and that could have important implications for Democrats.

Recently, I saw Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Democrats’ leading candidate for governor next year, give a compelling talk about her candidacy.

However, she didn’t mention one word that was once the foundation of every Democratic campaign: jobs.

Later, she told me: “I like to think in terms of careers, not jobs.” That may be true in a white-collar world. But that’s not how Keith, a janitor at Wayne State University feels.

He’s making a fraction of what he did as a tool-and-die worker a decade ago. But then he lost his house and two cars before finding work as a custodian. “What I want is a better paying job,” he told me last year.

Hillary Clinton showed little sign of listening. The New Democrats thought it was proof they had the right message when her husband Bill was elected president in 1992.

During his first term, he agreed to things that would have been anathema to Democrats of a previous generation, including sweeping welfare “reform” which threw millions off the rolls. Clinton also formed an alliance with Alan Greenspan, the longtime, almost libertarian chair of the Federal Reserve Board, the powerful body that sets interest rates.

New Democrats felt certain they’d found the prescription for, as Clinton political swami James Carville put it, “40 more years” of being dominant. Twenty years ago, just months after Mr. Clinton’s re-election, Tony Blair’s similarly re-invented “New Labour Party” won a huge landslide in Britain.

Left-wing populism seemed politically dead.

Yet things suddenly seem different now.

Last year, according this logic, Hillary Clinton ought to have won a landslide over Donald Trump.

She was totally acceptable to Wall Street, and made few promises to the poor – or to desperate blue-collar workers whose good-paying jobs have disappeared.

The Clinton strategy worked well with the better off. Republican women in places like Oakland County in Michigan voted for her. Nevertheless, she stunningly lost the state.

Hundreds of thousands of workers who voted for Barack Obama chose Trump instead – possibly because he promised to bring back lost jobs.

During last year’s Democratic primary campaign, Clinton was opposed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. According to Democratic Leadership Council doctrine, Sanders’s candidacy should have gone nowhere.

He was an avowed Socialist, thought to be the utter kiss of death in American politics, and was an openly non-religious Jew. He turned 75 before the election, had a cranky demeanour – and ran on a left-wing, populist message.

Yet Sanders, who wasn’t even a Democrat, won 13.2 million votes, getting huge majorities among the young.

He won Michigan in an upset and took Wisconsin by a landslide – two of the three normally Democratic states that ultimately tipped the election.

Has the ideological spectrum shifted?

Maybe not as much as some thought. Mondale did indeed tell voters in 1984 he would raise their taxes. (He also predicted that Ronald Reagan would too, as he indeed did.)

But Reagan was so popular then that he likely would have won if Democrats promised to abolish taxes.

What’s indisputable is this: President Trump did talk about jobs and promised to bring them back – and won every major Midwestern manufacturing state except Illinois.

Democrats running for office next year might do well to remember the late Ohio Gov. James Rhodes’ succinct political philosophy: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”

He wasn’t exactly polished. He was, in fact, what you might call the last blue-collar Republican.

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